mber Mirabeau raised the question
of a parliamentary Ministry, both in the press and in the Assembly. He
prepared a list of eminent men for the several offices, assigning to
himself a seat in the Cabinet without a portfolio. It was a plan to
make him and Talleyrand masters of the Government. The Ministers of
the day did not trust him, and had no wish to make way for him, and
when, on November 6, he proposed that Ministers be heard in the
National Assembly, the Archbishop of Bordeaux instigated Montlosier
and Lanjuinais to oppose him. Both were men of high character, and
both had some attainments; and in their aversion for him, and for his
evident self-seeking, they carried a motion forbidding deputies to
take office. By this vote, of November 7, which permanently excluded
Mirabeau from the councils of the king, the executive was deprived of
authority. It is one of the decisive acts of the Constituent Assembly,
for it ruined the constitutional monarchy.

Mirabeau was compelled to rely on a dissolution as the only prospect
of better things. He knew that the vote was due as much to his own bad
name as to a deliberate dislike of the English practice. The question
for him now was whether he could accomplish through the Court what was
impossible through the Assembly. He at once drew up a paper, exhorting
the king to place himself at the head of the Revolution, as its
moderator and guide. The Count of Provence refused to submit his plans
to the king, but recommended him for the part of a secret adviser.
Just then an event occurred, which is mysterious to this day, but
which had the effect of bringing Mirabeau into closer relations with
the king's brother. At Christmas, the Marquis de Favras was arrested,
and it was discovered that he was a confidential agent of the Prince,
who had employed him to raise a loan for a purpose that was never
divulged--some said, to carry off the king to a frontier fortress,
others suspected a scheme of counter-revolution. For the electoral law
excluded the ignorant and the indigent from the franchise, limiting
the rights of active citizenship to those who paid a very moderate sum
in taxes. It was obvious that this exclusion, by confining power to
property, created the raw material for Socialism in the future. Some
day a dexterous hand might be laid on the excluded multitude
congregated at Paris, to overthrow the government of the middle class.
The Constituent Assembly was in danger of being overtr